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The Last Man Standing

By Peter Dornan

Authors:

Peter Dornan

'Where was the rest of the Company? Why was no one else firing? Herb turned to look, and before him saw the shocking truth. He was alone. No one was following . . . there was no one left to follow. He was the last man standing.'The Battle of El Alamein was one of the turning points of the Second World War. Churchill later reflected, 'It might be said that before El Alamein we never had a victory; after El Alamein we never had a defeat.'The Australian 9th Division played a major part in the victory at El Alamein and was given high praise from Montgomery, Churchill and even Rommel, who said, 'I could have won North Africa with a division of Australians under my command.' But victory came at a heavy price with the lives of 1177 Australians lost at El Alamein, almost as many as in Kokoda and Tobruk combined.Herb Ashby was wounded in the Siege of Tobruk and served in the Battle of El Alamein. With three Victoria Crosses awarded to his battalion during the campaign, including two to his platoon, Herb assisted his battalion to become the most highly decorated Australian battalion in the war.This is Herb's story of the Tobruk, El Alamein and war in the Western Desert.

The Last Templar

By Raymond Khoury

Authors:

Raymond Khoury

A secret lost for a thousand years. A deadly race to keep it buried...1291 AD, Acre. As the city burns under the onslaught of the Sultan's men, the Falcon Temple sets sail, carrying a small band of knights and a mysterious chest entrusted to them by the Order's Grand Master. But the ship vanishes without a trace...Present day New York. At the Metropolitan Museum, four horsemen dressed as Knights Templar storm the gala opening of an exhibition of Vatican treasures and, in a brutal and bloody attack, steal an arcane medieval decoder. For FBI agent Sean Reilly and archaeologist Tess Chaykin this is just the start of a deadly game of cat and mouse as they race across three continents in search of the ruthless killers - and a centuries-old mystery...

Lemmy

By Mick Wall

Authors:

Mick Wall

In 'The Ace of Spades', Motörhead's most famous song, Lemmy, the born-to-lose, live-to-win frontman of the band sang, 'I don't want to live forever'. Yet as he told his friend of 35 years, former PR and biographer Mick Wall, 'Actually, I want to go the day before forever. To avoid the rush...'. This is his strange but true story. Brutally frank, painfully funny, wincingly sad, and always beautifully told, LEMMY: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY is the story of the only rock'n'roller never to sell his soul for silver and gold, while keeping the devil, as he put it, 'very close to my side'. From school days growing up in North Wales, to first finding fame in the mid-60s with the Rockin' Vicars; from being Jimi Hendrix's personal roadie ('I would score acid for him'), to leading Hawkwind to the top of the charts in 1972 with 'Silver Machine' ('I was fired for taking the wrong drugs'); from forming Motörhead ('I wanted to call the band Bastard but my manager wouldn't let me'), whose iconoclastic album NO SLEEP 'TIL HAMMERSMITH entered the UK charts at No. 1.Based on Mick's original interviews with Lemmy conducted over numerous years, along with the insights of those who knew him best - former band mates, friends, managers, fellow artists and record business insiders - this is an unputdownable story of one of Britain's greatest characters. As Lemmy once said of Wall, 'Mick Wall is one of the few rock writers in the world who can actually write and seems to know anything about rock music. I can and do talk to him for hours - poor bastard.' With the hard part of his journey now over, Lemmy is set to become a legend. LEMMY: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY explains exactly how that came to be.

The Letters Of George And Elizabeth Bass

By Miriam Estensen

Authors:

Miriam Estensen

In August 1800, George Bass returned to England after five years in the British colony of New South Wales. Gifted, ambitious and impatient with the limitations of a naval career, he took leave from the navy to purchase a ship of his own and organise a commercial venture to Sydney. He also met Elizabeth Waterhouse, and fell very much in love. They were married on 8 October 1800. On 9 January 1801, George Bass sailed for Australia.For the next two years, and across two oceans, letters were the only link between George and Elizabeth Bass. His were brief, dashed across the page with an impatient hand, embedded with tantalising references to his life at sea or the colony of New South Wales and filled with love for his wife. Hers were many pages of small, neat script with news of her friends and family, her own thoughts and pursuits, and her yearning for a husband who would never return.The separate worlds in which George and Elizabeth lived also come to life in their letters: an England of domestic chatter and streets filled with soldiers awaiting a Napoleonic invasion; the hot humid coastal towns of Brazil, where Bass sought to sell his merchandise and took on board firewood, fresh water and tobacco; Sydney society and the disappointment of the ladies in Elizabeth not having come with her husband to join their small social circle; the exotic and languid Pacific islands where trade was difficult and ship labour hard.Rich in detail and deeply personal, The Letters of George and Elizabeth Bass provides a uniquely vivid and intimate portrait of the lives of these two young people and the era in which they lived.

Like a Bat Out of Hell

By Mick Wall

Authors:

Mick Wall

'A passionate, pacey tome you should do anything for a copy of' - Kerrang! ****"I never wanted to be a big star. I just wanted to be the biggest at what I do! Powerful, unstoppable, heavy - when that word still meant something good!" - Meat Loaf, as told to Mick Wall Everything in the story of Meat Loaf is big. From the place he was born (Texas); to the family he was born into (his father weighed 22 stone, his uncle weighed over 40 stone, while Meat Loaf himself weighed 17 stone before he was even in his teens); to the sound he made (a colossal collision between Richard Wagner, Phil Spector and Bruce Springsteen); and of course the records he sold - nearly 50 million in Britain and America alone. Now, on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Bat Out of Hell, the album that gave rise to Meat Loaf's astonishing career, and the premiere of Bat Out Of Hell: The Musical, Mick Wall, who has interviewed Meat Loaf on numerous occasions throughout his career, pulls back the curtains to reveal the soft-hearted soul behind the larger-than-life character he created for himself. From a tumultuous childhood with an alcoholic father to the relentless abusive bullying he endured, nobody could have predicted Meat Loaf's meteoric rise to fame. But when the messianic rock opera Bat Out of Hell was released in 1977, it became one of the biggest albums of all time, selling over 45 million copies worldwide to date. Its release marked the start of a rollercoaster ride of incredible highs and seemingly career-ending lows. By the 80s, Meat Loaf was battling with drug and alcohol addiction and escalating money problems that would eventually lead to a nervous breakdown. But just when it seemed like it was all over, the astonishing success of Bat Out of Hell II and the mega-hit 'I'd Do Anything For Love (But I Won't Do That)' marked an extraordinary new wave of success. Now, Mick Wall will bring this extraordinary story up to date, drawing on the hours he spent with Meat Loaf, both in interviews and on tour, as well as offering up a unique insight from those who have known him best.

Lost World of the Kimberly

Where did they come from? And how and when did they arrive in Australia? Little-known, difficult to reach, yet vital to this question are literally thousands of rock paintings, some believed to be as much as 50,000 years old, surviving high up in raised small caves on cliff faces in the remote and rugged Kimberley Ranges of North-West Australia. Known as 'Bradshaws', after pioneer farmer Joseph Bradshaw who chanced upon the first examples in 1891, they feature lithe, graceful human figures depicted in a fashion altogether different from that of even the oldest traditional art. Indeed, present-day Aborigines disown them, insisting that the paintings are from 'before our time' and dismissing them as 'rubbish' art.But just who were the people depicted in these Kimberley rock paintings? The paintings indicate a people with seafaring traditions, and this 'first wave' of pre-historic migrants to Australia could have a number of alternative origins.Ian Wilson describes the early work on the Bradshaw Paintings, and explains how new dating techniques have shed new light on the findings. He explores the theories advanced for the origins of these people; one possibility is settlement from the Andaman Islands, where pygmy-like tribes still survive and speak a language closely related to some original languages. Farther afield still the author draws connections with Saharan peoples, and he even unearths startling similarities with South American tribes. He claims that even the boomerang is not peculiar to Australia, but can be traced in other, potentially earlier, pre-historic communities.Recalling the early work of Thor Heyerdahl, this will be a wide-ranging and provocative book. It was the author's enthusiasms for art, art history and archaeology which sparked his interest in the Turin Shroud, leading to two international bestsellers, and he now applies these same enthusiasms to the very Australian (yet also potentially international) mystery of the Kimberley rock